Post #122: Fear and Loathing (The Poison in Political Views)

16 July 2024

“When a bhikkhu abides thus, if his mind inclines to talking, he resolves: ‘Such talk as is low, vulgar, coarse, ignoble, unbeneficial—that is, talk of kings, robbers, ministers, armies, dangers, battles, cities, countries, heroes, the dead, whether things are so or are not so—such talk I shall not utter.’”

— Mahasuññata Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 122.12)*

I

     That ignorance, desire, and aversion govern the world, as the Buddha taught—not only the world of politics but perhaps it in particular—is easy for us to see. Of course there is poison in your views, if you are my political adversary; but as for mine, that is a very different story, because I am right where you are wrong!

     It is not necessarily something we engage in out of spite, because we are so willfully malevolent, or so irreconcilably aggressive, but because of how we all see the world from a particular angle, and because of what happens to our differences of outlook if they become charged and intensified into political opposition. That politics divides us into camps of friends and enemies, and that if these divisions are deepened enough we may be willing to kill one another over them, is not a bug in the political program; it is the program of politics itself, with all its unifying and destructive potential (thus Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political, or Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents on the narcissism of small differences and on what a powerful glue for cohesion among insiders it is to foster hostility towards outsiders).

     As Max Weber observed in his famous lecture about politics as a vocation (given to students in the midst of the revolutionary turmoil that followed upon the end of the First World War), “He who lets himself in for politics, that is, for power and force as means, makes a pact with diabolical powers. For his actions it is not true that good can only lead to good, and evil only to evil, but often the opposite. Anyone who fails to see this remains, politically, a child.” It is a harsh truth to bear in mind, but one we cannot evade. In our private lives, we will usually be able to keep ends and means in rough alignment, and to orient our doings, for the most part at least, towards the golden rule. But it is not so in politics, which disposes us, at the extreme—and in war routinely—to do unto others without hesitation what we most dread them doing to us.

     Peace, on the other hand, is usually kept by a long and complex process of compromise and mutual accommodation; but compromises, for all their power to conciliate, give none of the parties what they really want, and they are often incoherent. The compromise between Toronto and Montreal over the new national capital after Confederation led to its establishment on the border of Upper and Lower Canada, in a lumber town so remote that Queen Victoria pronounced it a brilliant choice because the Americans would never find the place in the woods. (Memories of 1812 lingered, when a Canadian raiding party had found the White House in the swamps and set fire to it.) The neighbors eventually settled their differences and became friends; their respective capitals grew to respectable size and stature, though they never quite caught up with their elder urban siblings. Not all compromises turn out so well.

     Before the heat of our political passions, everything tends to look simple and enormously dramatic and momentous. Alas, the appearance of simplicity comes from the implicit selection we make of our facts in a largely unconscious manner; behind our filtering, the complexity is overwhelming. Thus the basis on which we make our decisions is always massively oversimplified and escapes being arbitrary only because it is so deeply dyed in the deceptive colors of interest and passion, desire and aversion. In the end we clash, often irreconcilably, not only over different purposes and priorities, but over alternate perceptions of reality. Without our perhaps becoming aware of the fact, it is as if we weren’t inhabiting the same world at all, and we behave accordingly.

     Thus politics has a way of bringing out the worst in us, even as it makes us feel righteous in our various tribal corners. Elections strain all this to the breaking point (see my brief reflections along these lines in the conclusion to #121), and the results are always a test of a society’s foundations, because any transition of power might trigger a civil war if the cables don’t hold on the suspension bridge that is the electoral contest. Hence the utter, inexcusable irresponsibility of trying to discredit the electoral process for personal or partisan advantage, the darkest of political sins, to which I shall return in due course.

     So far you may nod in agreement, in the abstract, when it has not yet been revealed whose ox might be getting gored, and when it may still sound rather obvious and banal, or perhaps too artificial and overly removed from the practical realities of life. So let me illustrate the problem by making it more personal and graphic, with a reflection on how politics has been taking me to places where I don’t particularly want to go, but where I feel myself compelled to venture once the can of poisonous worms that is political views has been opened.

II

     My troubles began not quite a fortnight ago, in a case of possible synchronicity (or so a Jungian might say: I answer, as usual, What do I know?), at night on the Fourth of July, a date that does not register here in Bangkok and of which I was, at the time, not thinking at all. I had, only the day before, caught a few glimpses of Mr. Biden’s erratic first debate performance and found myself still reeling from the implications and fallout, including Kamala Harris offering her spirited but painfully evasive defense, on CNN I think it was, when she was asked whether “he is always that way.” (In another synchronistic twist, news of the attempt on Mr. Trump’s life reached me just as I was making the last corrections on the part of my text that concerns him.**)

     My first draft weighed on me for several days and finally came out at more than five thousand words, driven not only by the immediate occasion, it was quite clear to me, but by some deeper frustrations that I found it more difficult to put my finger on, and that have led me to recast the text several times more, trying to figure out just what it is I am trying to get at (see my note on Walter Lippman in #121). The argument I was originally rehearsing, a protest not so much against Trumpian politics as against his entire way of being and presenting himself, was nothing very original—nothing that the participants in this long-running debate have not heard a thousand times before. It was, moreover, a highly uncharitable portrait even by my own admission, and as such never did seem to sit very well with the Dhamma and with my project on this blog.

     I realize only too well that what I am able to come up with may be wrong as to the facts, or misguided as to their interpretation, and worst of all, unjust to the real man behind the image. It may be so; but all my texts are strictly about what I see, not what I think others should do about it. Just like Montaigne, my great model in all this, “I offer what I believe, not what is to be believed. I aim here only at revealing myself, who will perhaps be different tomorrow, if I learn something new that changes me. I have no authority to be believed, nor do I want it.” (Essays I.26) I don’t myself like what I am seeing, and I would be much relieved if I were mistaken; yet the fact remains, alas, that as things stand I am quite unable to behold the world-class leader that Mr. Trump takes himself to be, with the enthusiastic support of so many admirers, and that what I see instead is insufferable jackass.***

     My own instinctive revulsion is, I admit, more a matter of gut-reaction than reasoned political argument (more to come on the latter, though), and I understand why the other side may have the same reaction to my type. What we are dealing with here, clearly, is a towering cultural-educational class-divide, in which I admit to being true-blue, midnight blue even, far past the Democrat spectrum and into old-world hues that have no direct American equivalent. If there is a point on which I can agree with Mr. Trump, though, it is that gut-instincts matter, even if ours seem to be, on most matters, quite contrary.

     I wonder whether perhaps my own incendiary piece of writing, and the anguishes behind it, might somehow be redeemed as a tolerance exercise of sorts. Since it swings both ways in close succession, maybe try whether you can get through to the end without hitting the roof in one or the other direction (or at least coming down quickly again), without wanting to shut up the writer or wishing him any harm, professional or reputational. That we must often appear fools and questionable characters to one another, if we only disagree enough, is unfortunate but probably unavoidable, if we are honest; but the itch to have the other side silenced, chastised, or punished for their wayward views, that dark impulse we can and must resist if we want to live together in some semblance of peace and mutual amity.

     The much-heard demand for civility, though welcome, will not suffice, I am afraid, for solving our problems, because too much of what we have to say to each other simply is not polite, not civil, not nice at all, and pretending otherwise is not much of a remedy for what ails us. One may deplore our fallen condition and shun, personally, all insults or expressions of disdain and contempt; but whether we like it or not, the incivilities too are part of the political vocabulary. Trying to edit them out makes me think of Bowdlerized editions of Shakespeare, or of certain American dictionaries that make body parts mysteriously disappear, as if they did not have names one should know about whether one intends to use them or not.

     The case for civility stands, but only if we are somehow able to incorporate the less than civil dimensions that don’t look like optional extras to me, but rather the very stuff of political conflict, like the dark matter and energy without which our universe might be made to look more reassuring to us at the expense of no longer adding up. Truly polite people never accuse others of being rude; they lead by example and find a way around the roughness. When a guest at one of Queen Victoria’s state banquets drank from the finger bowl, she did the same. The greatest test of civility, when the going gets tough, is not even what we say or refrain from saying, but whether we hear each other out when we would rather scream, raise a war cry, and bash each other’s heads in.

     Anyone still confused about how speech differs from violence or the incitement thereto should watch a bit of heated debate in the British House of Commons. The things that MPs there say routinely about each other make one’s ears ring even at a distance of several thousand miles, and yet British parliamentarians have cultivated, for centuries and to a perhaps unrivaled extent, the art of shelving their differences after the verbal combat and going out for a drink together. The red lines on the floor separating the government benches from those of the opposition bear witness to this crucial tradition, marking the distance necessary to keep debating adversaries out of the reach of each other’s swords.

     As my father once told me about a thesis he wrote about Franco-German city partnerships in the 1960s, it is entirely hopeless to base the case for toleration on mutual appreciation or approval. What we must learn, and relearn ever again, is to live in peace with others whom we consider utterly misguided and perhaps disastrously wrong about almost everything, but whose right to speak and think as they wish, so long as it does not cross the red line into doing physical harm, we would defend at any cost. It is no very new discovery, this hard-won principle of mutual toleration, but an enlightenment staple that came not out of thin air or a stroll in the park, but out of centuries of the most bloody religious wars imaginable.

     It does not matter much whether it was Voltaire who said it, or Jefferson, or Evelyn Beatrice Hall, or anybody else; what matters is that we have been unlearning it at our peril, in the mistaken but all-too widespread belief that our political sophistication is greater than theirs because we are latter-born.

III

     So here it goes, my own version of the craziness, suitably abbreviated from what I originally laid out in seven densely printed pages.

     What I see in Trumpism is not so much a defective political program as no substantial program at all, but only a series of supposedly infallible gut-instincts patched together into a scarecrow of an agenda. I see not just the usual disposition to tactical lying and self-serving fabrications that one expects in the political game, but a fundamentally untruthful orientation to the world, indeed a tendency towards make-believe and self-aggrandizing fantasies running so deep that I am not even sure Mr. Trump is aware when he is dealing in untruth. What serves his interests, it seems, is true for him by definition, and what is good for him is good for America. (The rest of the world matters only instrumentally.) Perhaps he is not really deluding himself quite so perfectly; if so he is at least disconcertingly good at keeping up the pretense, another layer of falsehood.

     I was not amused, in the first term, with the speed at Mr. Trump kept the revolving door turning, disposing of erstwhile loyalists from one day to the next as if they were so many paper napkins to be crumpled up and tossed into the bin. I would like to be confident that the resident at the White House is able and willing to read a little, and listen to others occasionally, both of which, according to the reports I have seen, never did seem to be the case with Mr. Trump. Most of all I was disgusted, though not surprised, sad to say, by how he handled his loss at the polls in 2020, when he was evidently willing to undermine the electoral process itself out of sheer vainglory and egocentrism. Contrast the dignified and honorable manner in which Messrs. McCain and Romney conceded to Obama.

     This I denounced, in my original text, as the political equivalent of poisoning the well, adding that such accusations, in the Middle Ages, were often mere hysteria in times of pestilence and panic, but that in this case the alarm looks well-justified to me, since whoever does not shrink from poisoning the common water cannot be trusted to stop at anything. I rounded off my argument by contending that Mr. Trump did and does not have the strategic genius to pull off a real coup d’état (nearly impossible to execute in the U.S., by design) and that what we got on January 6th was merely a tawdry parody, something dabbled in recklessly, with no real comprehension of the enormity he was engaging in, not only in terms of what it would take, but what it would mean to succeed—the sum of which seemed to me not much less irresponsible than the real thing would have been.

     His policies, as I’ve said, were not my main concern; what preoccupied me was more of an analysis, roughly along Platonic lines, of what parts of the soul his style represents, and on what level he is able to connect so effectively with the masses. I am not privy, as I have stressed before, to the real Donald, who may, carefully hidden from view, be in better shape; but so far as the public persona goes, I see evidence of such a severe deficient in the rational faculty, as Plato would have understood it, that it amounts to a moral scandal in a national and international leader. The spirited part may be more developed, but misdirected mostly towards bluster and bravado, not genuine courage; and his hydra I see raging largely unchecked in all directions. A fine exemplar, perhaps, of democratic man as Plato caricatures him the Republic, but not a flattering picture by most accounts.

     It was, in sum, not a very pleasant piece, to say the least, either to write or to read, and I decided, after I had worked off my spleen sufficiently, to show it to a few confidants and then to file it away quietly, never to be seen again. The world did not really need to know that yet another cantankerous character sees something of a Mussolini manqué in Mr. Trump: an over-acting center-stage bully, the triumph personified of mammon-worship and celebrity for celebrity’s sake, of crass tastes and crude ideas over every effort at mental refinement—breeding, reading, culture, education, anything that might raise a human being above Burke’s hoofs of the swinish multitude, etc.† Well, well…

IV

     So there it was, a piece with which I had taken considerable pains, but which, in the end, pleased me very little. (Friends of Trump, please note this disavowal: I mean it, not because I have come to see the light on your man, but because I don’t trust my own perspective, nor this manner of political discourse. What I mean to do is report on political poisons, my own included, not endorse them.††) What good could come, I asked myself, of adding my bit of bile to the already overflowing cauldron of gall and venom? And what did I really know, after all? The guy is not making a bid for buddhahood, he’s running again for CEO of the world’s biggest, baddest political behemoth. No use expecting halos and choirs of angels around him…

     So I was resigned and resolved to file the miserable thing away in some obscure folder on my hard-drive reserved for dark energies expended on therapeutic efforts best hidden from view. Among the handful designated recipients, however, there was a Danish thespian with libertarian leanings, a latter-day Prince of Denmark I am tempted to say, whom I would credit with being the first of my closer acquaintances to tell me, perhaps a year ago or so, that he had a soft spot for The Donald, considering the current alternatives. He was, as a test case, the perfect person to send my dark musings to, and he gave them a very spirited response that I found, if not entirely convincing on all points, then at least well-reasoned enough to make me question myself once more.

     He finished his counter-diatribe with an eye-catching picture, to put it politely, of someone he identified to me as the U.S. Secretary of Health (Assistant Secretary, to be precise, and a four-star admiral, no less, which came as an even greater surprise)—a certain Rachel Levine of whose public stature and high rank I had theretofore been blissfully ignorant. (Where have I been, you might wonder at this strange revelation? Easy: I have been hiding myself as far as possible from this kind of revelation, because I find it so disconcerting. Not of course that advancing the agenda in question should be beyond the bounds of political discourse and competition, but that I find it so bizarre to witness what a tangle the Western world has tied itself into, even before the added twist that it is being presented to us as a particular ornament to the Health Department.†††)

     Seen exclusively through the lens of previously neglected individual rights, to which the issue has been reduced in wide circles, such a case allows, apparently, for only one appropriate response: unconditional, enthusiastic applause. But there are other questions before us here, such as how much sense all this really makes, what it says about the personality in question, and what about us, if we now see only something to celebrate. My difficulty, in other words, is by no means with the exercise of freedom; it’s with the forced atmosphere of unquestioning approbation. So long as my freedom to say that I find it all rather troubling is not encroached upon, the matter will appear to me in a relatively benign and harmless light; but if I find myself confronted with the demand to cheer, or to hide my discomfort because it would, otherwise, be misrepresented as hateful and morally corrupt, then what could be only an issue between Rachel and her mirror becomes one also between myself and the millennial world I must live in.

     Someone’s professional capacities are not affected by such a late revelation about who he or she really is, you say. That may be so; but the unexpected biographical turn, to describe it charitably, may still raise questions about someone’s soundness of mind and judgment that do not simply disappear because our age no longer wants to hear about them, or because they have been conveniently deleted from the diagnostic manuals. The psychological pioneers of which I think so highly, Adler and Freud especially, as the reader has heard many times before (#43, #110, etc.), were not callous but compassionate men, sophisticated healers, explorers of the soul, perhaps even modern sages of sorts; and they took a very different view of the matter, one that I find far more compelling than what we are being force-fed these days. It would not make me abuse or persecute the individuals in question, far from it; but it would not make me want to glamorize their example either.

     From a Buddhist perspective, the tangled skein of sexual orientation and our contemporary obsession with identity politics looks so dubious not because it is so sinful, but because it presents such a distraction from what we should really be focusing our energies on in life. Sex, as an everyday part of the natural realm, for householders at least, is a fact of life that we may enjoy, but that we should not get too preoccupied with. It need not be feared or shunned, but should be taken lightly, which is precisely not what we are doing.

     As for investing ourselves, body and soul, in this or that supposed identity, the Buddhists would remind us, with a compassionate smile at our confusion, that we are simply adding layer after layer of self-conceit around a non-existent core. We are deepening our delusions by creating more misguided attachments, when what we should be doing is to move, with as much dispatch as possible, in the opposite direction, realizing that what we take to be the self, along with our mislabeled “identity,” never in fact remains identical from one moment to next. No matter how tenaciously we may believe in it, we are still dealing with a fiction, except insofar as we are, in the moment, biological creatures endowed with memory of causal relations and a great propensity for telling stories.

     We will not get punished from on high for our waywardness if we keep trying to shore up our self-serving tales with ever more elaborate flourishes and attachments; we will simply pay the price in suffering. We should not be devoting nearly so much effort to making others look at us; we should look at ourselves, recognize what is really going on, and stop the nonsense. The price if we don’t, once again, is for us to pay, not others. It all calls for compassion more than condemnation, but even so it is a serious delusion that should be firmly opposed, with as much gentleness as possible, and as much edge as necessary.

V

     I repeat: my unease before burly men with personal histories as football players suddenly stepping forth, well into their fifties, to proclaim to the world that they are now women (or perhaps, in some even more astonishing cases, that they have always been: nothing is impossible anymore today, it seems, see #106) would be no very grave concern, as being no business of mine, if there were no demand put on me to agree with them. If the persons in question were merely asking me to go along with their discovery, and no attempt were made to intimidate or compel anyone into acceding to a request politely made, bizarre as one may find it, I would be quite ready to comply quietly without further ado—whether for reasons of courtesy and mutual complaisance, or out of sympathy and compassion with what would be an awkward position to find oneself in, to say the least.

     Alas, we have long moved far beyond what an old liberal could still easily reconcile himself to, whatever his feelings about the wisdom or unwisdom of normalizing, or even encouraging, such strange discoveries. Instead, it has become nearly taboo, in the public realm, even to ask whether “transitions” like these are really plausible in the sense of making the men they were into credible women by any reasonable standard. Merely to entertain doubts and reservations on the subject is, increasingly, to commit a thought-crime in our age, and if the web of sanctions is not, as yet, very tight, so long as one is prepared to keep one’s mouth shut in polite company, it is not for want of trying on the other side. It is this latter dimension of the issue—not the individual request for recognition, but the categorical demand that it be granted, as if it were the most self-evident thing in the world, backed by methods of social compulsion, hard and soft, that amount at the same time to the implicit admission that it is not really so—that makes the situation so maddening and so dangerous.

     Nay more, not only have we left the old liberal parameters so far behind that only one attitude is officially acceptable any more, it is now no longer even enough to tolerate passively this theater of the absurd. Instead one is expected to pay fealty and bow before the new rainbow-colored gods of the state, and wildly to applaud as exemplars of unprecedented courage former men in uniform who have distinguished themselves not in the line of duty, as their antiquated ancestors once did, but in donning a dress and stilettos. This after we have already been made to witness all-too many times the degrading spectacle of citizens in supposedly free societies clapping their hands off in unison, before running cameras, as if they were delegates at a Communist Party conference—to abase themselves not before the big brothers and maximum leaders of yesteryear, but before so-called women who, in the ring or the pool, have taken to beating their supposed sisters, sometimes literally, on the strength of physical endowments inherited from what they supposedly left behind. What unexampled valor!‡

     It is this maddening dimension of compulsory cheering that gives the issue such frightful resonance and explosive power, because the sound of the frantic acclaim, in some of our ears, makes the very ground tremble under our feet. What began as a bid for privacy and toleration, many years ago, has taken on a new coloring altogether, and amounts, by now, to nothing less than a set-piece on the emperor’s new clothes, which must be effusively praised, upon command, on account of their great utility, their unquestionable beauty, and their vast advance over the benighted ways of the past … or else. This all-too familiar template for enforcing complaisance to a new and supposedly more virtuous order amounts, in effect, to putting a gun to someone’s chest and shouting, “Respect me or I shoot!” You may get forced outward compliance this way, but the move cannot possibly result in the desired respect, only silent loathing and disgust for a cause to which, before, one might have been mildly though distantly sympathetic. A little remove is not always a bad thing; it helps reduce friction, as unwelcome demands for approbation increase it immeasurably.

     Now we have a real problem, because either there are impostors taking their stand on an evident falsehood and backed, of late, by the full powers of the state in their delusions; or, to take the other view, we are faced with a motley crew of renegade refuseniks who must be made to toe the line, either by social pressure or by the sanctions of the law, because they are threatening the new state religion whose tenets have been made, in the name of all that is good and true, sacrosanct. A frightful mess to have gotten ourselves into: what to one side is a blatant public lie and a most nefarious effort to falsify the very facts of nature in the service of a deranged ideology, to the other is a high and orthodox secular truth that must on no account be publicly challenged, lest it lose its sacred sheen. It may still be a somewhat caricatured description, for now, to speak of a test of allegiance to the new creed that can be taken, where it is declined or denied, as evidence of a nefarious or even a criminal disposition. If we are not quite there yet, however, neither are we very far off anymore, and we must expect to move steadily closer if the current dispensation were allowed to continue and deepen for a few more years, say four. Or so say the dissidents, with a shudder.

VI

     Whatever one may think of these new heretics, it should be clear how much is on the line for them—because if they are no longer free to say, without fear of reprisals legal or social, something so very obvious to them, then they must naturally fear for all their freedoms. Why so? Because if they can be forced into yielding, in public at least, before something so patently untrue in their eyes, then how could they be safe, in principle, from anything? If today they must join in proclaiming a former linebacker a woman, irrespective of all that tells against the claim, aesthetically or biologically, philosophically or religiously, then what security could there be that tomorrow they will not perhaps be expected to bow before a Swiss cheese and declare it the new Messiah?

     The only sane course, so far as the dissidents are concerned, would be a return to the old liberal approach (in the philosophical rather than the contemporary political sense) whereby the request for recognition would be made by the individuals in question, and it would then be left for others to decide, freely and without fear of the repercussions, whether to go along, and with what degree of publicity and enthusiasm. But in such a world the requesting individuals’ ideas might be rejected; they might even be mocked and derided as absurd; and that must not be, under the new dispensation, because sexual self-identification, no matter how unconvincing to others, is no longer up for debate, but instead, according to the tenets of the next orthodoxy, nothing less than a sacred, inalienable, and unquestionable right. And when Swiss cheeses are discovered to have been endowed with a sacred right to get themselves recognized as redeemers, we not only have a serious problem, but the very earth opens up, and where there was solid ground before, now we stand at the edge of a yawning abyss, the brink of madness itself.

     How we ever got to this sorry point will then become, or rather, has already become, a much more pressing matter (say the dissidents) than the bizarre self-perceptions of a tiny minority, which before could have been easily handled on a point of toleration rather than high principle. Now, instead, we are facing a truly destabilizing crisis in the social contract, not over one man or woman in uniform at the top of a major government department, but over the menace of collective derangement, and what it means when the madness of crowds afflicts so sizable or influential a part of a society, or a civilization, that it becomes dangerous to oppose it. That is why I am afraid of, not of this or that isolated case of a Richard turning into a Rachel, or vice versa.

     Call on the recalcitrant to cheer the naked emperor, and they may indeed stand up as you command; but it may well be not to clap, but to be counted on the other side. In this dangerous division, I would insist that you have driven the dissidents into the other camp, perhaps against all previous personal and political inclination. This is how you make a cold cultural war turn hot, I would groan, and how you transform previously ordinary and innocuous, even liberal human beings into incipient fascists: you so threaten their sense of moral order that any remedy, even at the hands of a counter-maniac, begins to look less unnerving than the prospect of a further unraveling along familiar lines. (I am not suggesting that we stand on the verge of an American fascism, only that the dynamic is comparable.)

     Such a wretched pass in our affairs would not only be disheartening, it would be deranging, as Douglas Murray has described it so rightly,‡‡ as if we had decided that it would be a bright idea to conduct a psycho-political stress test to see just how far can we push this weird cultural revolution until not only the far side, but the middle too, snaps under the pressure. The political spectrum seems to have shifted so radically in recent years that I am no longer sure where the middle even is, or where I am in relation to it, though a life-long centrist in my self-perception. Whatever the answer may be, I can not only hear the cracking all around, I am cracking myself.

     Maybe another four years of Donald Trump is the price we must all pay to end one madness at the expense of another, if only as the lesser of two evils; maybe it is the other way around. There are no solutions in politics, as Thomas Sowell has said, only trade-offs; and they are often bitter.

     (For Fritz.)

*The list of unavailing speech in the original is much longer still, and by no means limited to public concerns. I have shortened it here to illustrate a point; it is not meant to suggest that the Buddha singled out politics and politics only, although a lot of the named items do point in that direction. “Prince” Siddhartha, as the one-time heir of a prominent local chieftain (not really a king), knew something of the world of power, and he remained a shrewd diplomat all his life. Shortly before his death, his entire people, the Sakyans, were wiped out in a punitive campaign over a dispute between erstwhile allies that was fatally aggravated by haughty and insulting behavior.

**In light of the attempt to kill Mr. Trump, it might be expected that I tone down my criticism. It would feel more disingenuous than ever if I were to do so now. At the same time, however much I may have come to dislike, distrust, and deplore the impression I have formed of the man (not at all the same thing as the real human being, I am only too aware), I would not have a single hair bent out of shape on his head (as the Germans say) on account of my views. If there is any way out of the mess we have gotten ourselves into, it must begin by restoring, with iron determination, the non-negotiable wall that must separate words from deeds, and speech that is unwelcome and perhaps hurtful from doing physical harm. The fatal erosion of this all-important distinction over the past thirty years I take to be one of the most alarming features of our times.

***I just saw that Mr. Musk has endorsed Mr. Trump on grounds of being, supposedly, the toughest presidential candidate since Theodore Roosevelt. I have said my bit about Elon’s sometimes peculiar perceptions (#121); he has interacted with the man up close, as I have not, obviously, and he may know things about him that I don’t. All I can say is that I only saw Mr. Trump duck (quite sensibly), posture (quite unsurprisingly), and allow himself to be led away (quite safely, I hope) by a team of bodyguards who would presumably have taken the next bullet for him. At no point did he have to face, knowingly and without protection, the kind of incoming fire that any soldier in war must put up with as a matter of course. Mr. Trump had his chance to prove himself that way, in a war he supported; he preferred to let others do the fighting for him. In this he was no worse than many men of his generation and background, and I don’t blame either him or them; but he certainly did not distinguish himself.

As for the historical comparison, it verges on the absurd. LBJ and Nixon were tough sons of bitches even to their worst detractors. The amount of pain JFK endured in a typical day boggles the mind as much as the number of women he went through in a typical week. Say what one may about the family regime of Joe Kennedy, he did not raise wimps. Eisenhower was not made supreme Allied commander to face the Wehrmacht for being a pushover, and Hoover deserves to be better remembered for his Herculean efforts as coordinator of the U.S. relief efforts in Europe during and after the First World War. There is no shortage of tough and accomplished men on the roster of presidents, and from what I know of Mr. Trump he is lucky to be named in one breath with them. As for the Rough Rider, the only parallel I can make out is their shared propensity to talk big and grandstand; but in Roosevelt’s case this went with such high distinctions, personal and political, that I would not consider Trump supporters wise for making it their standard of comparison.

†I rounded it all off with some dark reflections on where we stand, these days, in relation to the republican (as against democratic, both emphatically in lower-case) vision of the founders, and I contended that the electoral college, with its sensible provisions for running the popular vote through a filter of responsible and sober second judgment, had originally been intended to protect us from the very predicament we are finding ourselves in today—not an embarrassing lottery for giving attention to peripheral states that might otherwise miss their fifteen minutes of political fame.

††In keeping with the title, I meant to include an epigraph from Hunter S. Thompson’s crazed reporting about the “decadence and depravity” of the Kentucky Derby: “My eyes had finally opened enough for me to focus on the mirror across the room and I was stunned at the shock of recognition. There he was, by God—a puffy, drink-ravaged, disease-ridden caricature. It was the face we’d been looking for—and it was, of course, my own. Horrible, horrible…” In the end Dr. Gonzo had to make way for the Buddha at the head of my text, but the element of unfavorable self-recognition is still central to my piece. On the face of it, Hunter’s deranged rampage at the Derby had everything to do with the fried circuits of a drug-addled brain, and very little with political poisons; but turn to the conclusion of the piece (Kent State and Cambodia) and it becomes clear that their maddening swirl is not so easily escaped.

†††I don’t believe I harbor any great antipathy, let alone phobia, towards the individuals in question. As a private matter, I have some sympathy with their plight, such as it is. What bothers me is the confused example they are setting, and our increasingly confused reactions. It is the demand not only for unconditional recognition but for applause, and our willingness to silence opposition, that I consider so deeply pernicious, and that creates in me (and surely not in me only) a level of visceral animosity that I would not otherwise be feeling. Transphobia, I must insist, is nothing but a nasty propaganda term that seeks to normalize aberration by defining it away and insinuating that all residual common-sense resistance must be rooted in nothing but irrational fears. I grant that we are all irrational on many things, at least partly neurotic on some, and perhaps outright mad on a few. This would be true not of one side only, however, but of everyone, albeit to varying degrees. If opposition to the trans-agenda is derided as transphobia, then I shall extend the courtesy to the champions of the cause and diagnose them with transmania. In a saner world, it would be equally obvious that nobody should be abused over the matter, that there are some places where it is much less appropriate than others, and that it does not merit celebration, awards, or standing ovations.

‡I don’t deny that it takes nerve to face the world with one’s demand for this kind of recognition: the heat from some quarters would indeed be brutal, even scorching. For my part, I don’t wish to see anyone getting burned—me or you, him or her, us or them. There’s an exercise Schopenhauer recommends for reducing resentments: picture your enemies already suffering the worst you might wish unto them in your darkest moments. See how long your hatred lasts. If you have a heart, there should be nothing gratifying in their agonies; it is the menace they pose to what you hold dear that drives the loathing, and it usually goes both ways. That said, I don’t see, these days, a bitterly persecuted minority, but such a sure way to attract attention and passionate support, even accolades of the sort I am describing, that “transitioning” is very far from a heroic act of lone integrity anymore, but something one might well pursue with the social compensations in mind, whether consciously or not.

‡‡Thus the opening line of Murray’s Madness of Crowds (Bloomsbury 2020): “We are going through a great crowd derangement.” And p. 247: “These are deranged claims, and—like so many claims in the trans debate—they go on to derange anyone who has to listen to them, let alone those pushed to go along with them or assume that they are true.” (For deranging, see pp. 65, 80, 98, 105, 159.)